For Christmas 2024, I was gifted Robert Sullivan’s delightful My American Revolution: A Modern Expedition Through History’s Forgotten Battlegrounds. I devoured it within 24 hours. It is no exaggeration to say that the book is responsible as anything else for this little Semiquincetennial miniseries you are (hopefully!) enjoying.
As you will hear in this episode, Sullivan at the time of publication (2012) was not unlike I am now – a south Brooklyn writer dude & dad in his mid-50s who enjoyed walking around and noticing that whole neglected swaths of the neighborhood were actually important sites during and after the Revolutionary War. The spirit of the book, and hopefully this miniseries, is that there is zero shame, only the upsides of discovery and delight, in choosing to enjoy the history all around you. In fact I’m pretty sure Producer Jason used Sullivan’s example to make a (mostly disastrous) crossing of the Delaware this past Christmas….
Please buy the book! You’ll enjoy it, and more good sales = more good guests. And enjoy a conversation about Brooklyn’s Revolutionary past, forgotten corners of the war, and how places keep (or lose) their history over time.
* “Weird” is in the eye of the beholder
* Books as ideas you can’t shake off
* Watching the Bicentennial tall ships come in
* Dad was a printer; son uses flip-phones
* The “craziest war crime burned in American memory”
* “You get so much from being away from a place”
* Every historical memory dies, baby that’s a fact
* You can’t just take a boat across New York Harbor?
* Book-organizing secret: The calendar
* The forgotten Battle of Golden Hill
* Hercules Mulligan: Thinker, tailor, Revolutionary spy
* The “coldest winter on record in North America”
* Pro-Philly historical bias
* The “only meteorologist to have a battle named after him in Italy”
* Stolen poetical valor
* America’s forgotten Dunkirk
* WHERE ARE THE GOWANUS BONES?
* Perennially underrated spontaneous mutual aid
* The Invention of George Washington, by Paul K. Longmore (Bookshop | Amazon)
* The Revolutionary-era books by William Hogeland (Amazon)
* The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (Bookshop | Amazon)
Intro sequence by the one and only Arch Stanton!
Outro music (audio podcast only) by the great Eli Lake!
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